South Africa needs more to choose from

The emerging split in the African National Congress may be a way forward to revitalising South African politics, but only if the debate moves on from the personalities to discussing differences of policy.

The ANC has run South Africa since May 1994, when apartheid ended and majority rule was established. It has been all powerful at a national level, and even at the provincial level it has only ever shared power for brief periods with two other parties, the Inkatha Freedom Party and the New National Party (which it eventually absorbed anyway).

This long period of uninterrupted rule is likely to continue for the foreseeable future as the ANC is overwhelmingly dominant in South African politics.

The danger is such a situation is that any debate over policy and national direction are not decided by the people voting in elections, since the super-party will win anyway, but by party officials operating in closed door committee sessions, who will also decide who stands for office. Such a situation is dangerous because in the end the super-party loses touch with the people, secure that it will win anyway.

For three years, there has been a bitter power struggle between the then South African president Thabo Mbeki and the deputy president Jacob Zuma. The political struggle widened to include rape and corruption charges, but eventually Zuma won, and Mbeki resigned from both the ANC leadership and the presidency of the country, to the fury of Mbeki's supporters

South Africa's former defence minister Mosiuoa Lekota is one of Mbeki's closest allies, and he is so angry about Mbeki's ejection from office that he has threatened to form a new party. The ANC needs to split, in order to present the South African voters with a choice, but whether Lekota's faction is the start of such a new party depends on it moving beyond being angry over Mbeki's loss, and on developing a serious political programme for which people can vote.